Revision as of 15:36, 13 October 2011

Contents

Who Am I?

I haven't entered my real name in my preferences partially because I like the anonymity offered by wikis -- nobody needs to connect my offline identity with my online edits. I am under no illusion that it would be difficult for anyone to figure out my real name, but it's enough trouble that most people won't bother.

My wife is a writer and an editor, who is deeply skeptical of the idea of engaging in either activity without compensation. (Good thing I'm the amateur in our family.) One of her favorite sayings is, "All work is the avoidance of harder work." I get a lot of work done on Wikitravel by avoiding harder work.

Administrator

I am one of Wikitravel's administrators. This gives me several powers, some of which (e.g. blocking IP addresses, protecting pages) Wikitravel prides itself on rarely using. The one I use most frequently is the ability to revert changes with the click of a mouse. If I have reverted one of your changes, feel free to leave a note on my talk page and ask why. I only revert changes that have a clear negative impact on the page -- violating one of our policies, breaking the wiki markup, etc.

External Links

As of 15 Feb 2006, we had 3269 matches to a search for External Links. Almost every one of those hits was not in conformity with the external links policy, so I started to go after them. Part of my motivation was that these sections seem to suggest to new users that we welcome links to their travel guide, photo album, booking service, etc. As of 24 May 2006, we got down to 233, and in July, we made it to the point where we have 17 hits for the search, which are mostly not actual hits. Those that remain are travel topics, which I'm less concerned about.